Tuesday, 31 March 2015

SHOP IN FRANCE : The shop is a static backdrop to an intricately choreographed dance - some moving, some pointing, some staring. If it was a painted canvas you would be tempted to say that it was unrealistic.

Monday, 30 March 2015

BACK STREET, HANLEY, NORTH STAFFORDSHIRE : This was taken more than 40 years ago. If such back streets still exist in the Five Towns they will now be crammed full of plastic wheelie bins and half-parked cars.

Thursday, 26 March 2015

POSTERS, HALIFAX, LATE 1960s : Sometimes photographs don't capture beauty but stop time with the efficiency of a sledge hammer on a wristwatch. I couldn't help but check on where the wrestlers are now - all gone with the finality of a count of ten.

Tuesday, 24 March 2015

TOWN IN IRELAND (Circa 1965) : It is ten past twelve. It is Ireland. And there the certainty ends. It will have been fifty or so years ago and we were making our way from Larne in Northern Ireland down to Kerry. This little town could have been anywhere en-route. Another country, another time.

Thursday, 19 March 2015

The description "black and white" always seems to be underselling the medium. There is grey, of course, but there is also line and shape. And you seem to notice these two far more when your eye is not distracted by all those flashy reads and bumptious greens.

Wednesday, 18 March 2015

The Theatre Royal, Halifax. Boarded-up, deserted. Tucked away down Shakespeare Street is the old actor's entrance. Once the gateway to music hall, melodrama, classical theatre and opera it is now the repository for stale urine and empty bottles. A Shakespearean tragedy in Halifax.

It's all angular; you could cut yourself quite badly on that leading edge. It sprouts from a patch near the centre of Halifax that used to be the home of a brewery: all odds and ends, curves and pipes; as blunt as a barrel. It fits its environment like a lump of breeze block in the wall of the Taj Mahal.

Saturday, 14 March 2015

There was a time - in the 1950s and 60s - when towns like Halifax seemed to be in love with the future. And the future was motor cars: great big metallic, two-toned, chromium-plated beasts that drank petrol with the abandon of an alcoholic. And the garages that sold them were, in the main, bastions of modernity - plate-glass showcases of the future. Trinity Garage was such a building: standing proudly at the top of Hunger Hill as if mocking it's very name. The building remains - a little shabby without the chic - but the cars are long gone. Hunger Hill is fighting back.

Thursday, 12 March 2015

I had a bit of a bad feeling about this one. As I entered the very long, very dark and very deserted old walkway under the railway line there was a young bloke in a hoody walking a very cross looking dog approaching behind me. The shot looking out of the old stone viaduct was a good one but I knew if I waited a little and repressed my desire to run away, it would be even better. The young chap was charming. He wished me good morning and the dog wagged its tail. And then he walked on. And I took the picture. And I had a bit of a good feeling about this one.

Tuesday, 10 March 2015

One definition of "providence" is "timely preparation for future eventualities". So when they built Providence Place Chapel in Cleckheaton in 1857 they probably thought that if the congregation eventually dwindled they could convert the building into an Indian Restaurant. And so they did.

Monday, 9 March 2015

Now it is a double glazing shop, before that it was a travel agents, but what was it when it was given it's name - The Pygmalion? In classical mythology, Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved. A clothes shop, perhaps.

Sunday, 8 March 2015

"Before performing the ceremony assigned him, Mr Anderson assured those present that he appreciated very highly the honour conferred upon him by the committee and his fellow townsmen in the request to lay the memorial stone of the Town Hall. He would much rather have left the duty to some distinguished person from some other part of the country ("No")"

Saturday, 7 March 2015

Not many people sculpt lion's bottoms. Great stone and marble statues featuring lion's heads are ten a penny, common as muck. But for the fine proportions of a lion's backside you have to wander off the beaten track and look at things from a different perspective.

Friday, 6 March 2015

I took this picture ten years ago and it has lay dormant in my digital files until, by chance, I looked at it yesterday and thought "what a busy scene to have going on beneath your bedroom window" A little research on line revealed that it was the work of an Hungarian sculptor called Alice Lux (you can just see her name at the right hand end of the relief). She was the wife of the architect of the building, Hugo Gregersen, and together they were responsible for a number of such artistic elements which serve to brighten up what otherwise might be a drab mid-twentieth century scene.

Wednesday, 4 March 2015

There is something slightly hazy about this old scanned negative. Something slightly hazy about the four pensioners. They were sat in Eastbourne, a town which is often referred to as "God's Waiting Room" because of the preponderance of pensioners. I wonder if they are still sat there now, a third of a century later.

Tuesday, 3 March 2015

One of the great delights of digital photography is not simply that you can capture a moment in time but the details of the capture are recorded forever, carved in digital stone, etched in acidic metadata. This photograph was taken by me at 15.58 on the 13th April 2005 in Budapest. Ten years on, is this girl still sending postcards home?

Monday, 2 March 2015

The problem with scanning old slides is that they usually have acquired a layer of dust thick enough to protect them from a moderate arctic breeze. You can carefully airbrush the dust specks out, but on the whole, life is too short. Better to leave them in place - it's what Georges Seurat did after all.

Sunday, 1 March 2015

Can there be a sadder sight in all the world than that of a derelict pub? Fallen statues of fallen leaders I can take. Crumbling abbeys amidst pastoral settings can have a special beauty all of their own. Demolished hovels giving way to new houses can give you hope for the future. But a derelict pub - it is enough to make you turn to drink.

About Me

One time lecturer, writer on European Affairs and bus conductor, Alan Burnett now divides his time between walking the dog and a little harmless blogging. His News From Nowhere Blog has been running since 2006 and acts as a showcase for his ranting and writing and his photographs old and new.